Design

Comparison with the reference design, front view

ASUS MATRIX GTX580 P/2DIS/1536MD5

Reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580

Comparison with the reference design, rear view

ASUS MATRIX GTX580 P/2DIS/1536MD5

Reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580

This card is a custom product from ASUS designed for overclockers. It has better power potential, improved power connectors (two 8-pin instead of 6 and 8-pin), custom power converter, better power-saving elements, especially in core circuitry. Aside from factory overclocking, the card lets you adjust core and memory voltages by means of "+" and "-" buttons, in 0.01 V steps.

There's also a Safe Mode button for quick settings reset. And, of course, you can fine-tune settings by means of ASUS GPU Tweak utility.

This tool can also provide monitoring and other information about the card. Note that core overclocking is bound to raising voltage by default, and the utility increases voltage automatically at extreme overclocking to avoid damage. You can adjust both settings separately, but then you'll be the one to blame for any damage.

I got the card to work fine at 910/1820/4500 MHz. Just to remind you, the standard clock rates of GTX 580 are 772/1544/4000 MHz. The screenshots actually show higher overclocking (950 MHz core), but stability wasn't the best and the drivers crashed a couple of times over 8 hours of continuous testing. Perhaps, I should've increased core voltage a bit as well, but I didn't want to risk it.

Maximum resolutions and frequencies:

240 Hz maximum refresh rate

2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz max. digital (DVI) resolution

2048 x 1536 @ 85Hz max. analog (VGA) resolution

As mentioned above, the card has two 8-pin supplementary power connectors, but it may be bundled with only one power adapter, so make sure you get another.

One more feature is a GPU load indicator — that large "MATRIX" line on the cooler cover. Blue color means 2D or light 3D mode, red means heavy 3D load. A nice bonus, I'd say.

Cooler

The cooler features two heatsinks interconnected by heatpipes, two fans, and a heatsink for transistors. Memory chips do not have dedicated cooling which isn't nice, especially given the total dimensions of the card.

Speaking of dimensions, the cooler is very large, the card occupying as many as three expansion slots. It's also longer than standard.

Thanks to the large heatsink and fans, fan speed is low, so the cooler is almost noiseless.

Temperature monitoring results

We measured temperatures using the MSI Afterburner utility.

Overclocked to 910/1820/4500 MHz

As you can see, the cooler is very efficient even at extreme overclocking, so the temperature only reaches 83 degrees Celsius.

Package contents, box

Can't say much about package or box, because we got the card as an OEM product.